FITS AND STARTS

John Kerry didn't want to get on his own campaign bus. It was just after Labor Day 2003, and the day before, Kerry had formally launched his candidacy with a forgettable speech, delivered while standing in front of an aircraft carrier in Charleston, S.C. Now, as he was preparing to leave a rally in Manchester, N.H., Kerry strongly objected to the slogan plastered on the side of the bus: COURAGE EQUALS KERRY. He was traveling with his Vietnam buddies, and combat veterans didn't like advertising themselves that way, he protested. Real warriors--men who have actually been shot at--don't care to brag, or even much talk about it. Kerry was in a funk. He stood outside the bus, refusing to get on while he complained about the posters advertising his personal courage. "You have to get on the bus," quietly insisted his top adviser, Bob Shrum. "I'll get on the staff bus," Kerry pouted.

His handlers had seen it before. Kerry did not like to play the brave war hero. His pollster, Mark Mellman, had tested a theme line--"John Kerry has the courage to do what's right for America"--and voters seemed to like it. But Kerry didn't. He was uncomfortable with showy displays of any kind, but especially ones that glorified his combat record. Jim Margolis, his paid media man, was eager to make ads using the almost three hours of film footage Kerry had shot with a handheld super-8 camera in Vietnam. The catch was that only about 15 seconds showed Kerry. "Goddammit, John, didn't you want to send anything home to your parents, for God's sake?" Margolis complained. Kerry answered, "No, that isn't what I was trying to do." He had wanted to capture his experiences--the countryside, the Vietnamese people, the ravages of war. Not to show off himself.

Kerry didn't want to talk about the war. And yet he seemed to talk about it all the time, constantly reminding voters that he (unlike most other politicians, including George W. Bush) had fought for his country. Evoking his war record had been his trump card at critical moments in his political career. (In his hotly contested '96 Senate re-election campaign, his opponent, popular Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, criticized Kerry's opposition to the death penalty. Kerry gravely intoned, "I know something about killing...") Chris Heinz, Teresa Heinz Kerry's 31-year-old son who enjoyed a teasing, macho relationship with his stepfather, bluntly warned Kerry that the press was beginning to view Kerry's frequent evocations of his Vietnam service as a tired cliche. To some of Kerry's aides, the senator seemed almost bipolar about his war record: on the one hand, the strong silent type; on the other, living proof that the Vietnam War will never end.

To show off--or not? To be proud--or humble? To strut--or self-deprecate? Sometimes Kerry seemed torn by conflicting impulses, and not just about his war record. Like every politician, he yearned to be noticed. The wise guys of the Massachusetts media and political establishment made fun of Kerry for hogging the limelight: they called him "Live Shot." As a legislator he was not a backroom dealmaker. He liked to be out front, conducting high-profile investigations of hot topics like allegations of drugrunning by the CIA. And yet he was capable of small acts of modesty and decency, of giving credit to others, and he often seemed uneasy before a camera or a microphone.

Kerry's ambivalence helps explain why he is not a natural politician. Kerry cannot sit still. He must always be up and doing, and he has been running for president, depending on whom you believe, since he was 14 years old, 18 at the latest. He was mocked for his ambition ("JFK," it was said, stood for "Just For Kerry"). Yet his more perceptive schoolmates always sensed that he was listening to some inner voice, telling him not to give in to the siren song of self-promotion. It is the same stern, patrician voice--preaching modesty, humility, duty--that whispered into the ears of generations of privileged youth of the old WASP ascendancy, including generations of Bushes. "I do not want to hear the Great I Am," Dorothy Walker Bush, mother and grandmother of presidents, had scolded her son George if he bragged too much about his sporting triumphs as a schoolboy in the 1930s and 1940s.

Though Kerry liked to play down his elitist side--his accent, pure Thurston Howell III as a young man, became less plummy over time--he never shed all the trappings of his social class, or tried to. To his classmates Kerry had been a bit of an outsider, the fruit of some Brahmin seed (a Winthrop and a Forbes on his mother's side, but he learned only late in life that he was part Jewish on his father's side), and he was never as well off as most of his classmates. They thought he tried a little too hard to show that he really belonged and, by striving, betrayed his insecurity. The WASP ascendancy was beginning its decline when Kerry graduated from the poshest of the New England prep schools, St. Paul's, in 1962, but its gentleman's code of muscular Christianity was still strong. Episcopal Church schools like St. Paul's tried to teach the virtue of humility, the sin of pride, the value of quiet service to others...